Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840-1920

• 1 –

INTRODUCTION: GENDER AND SPACE IN

RURAL BRITAIN, 1840–

Gemma Goodman and Charlotte Mathieson

How little the real characteristics of the working-classes are known to those who are

outside them, how little their natural history has been studied, is suffi ciently disclosed

by our Art as well as by our political and social theories. Where, in our picture exhibi-

tions, shall we fi nd a group of true peasantry? ... Th e notion that peasants are joyous,

that the typical moment to represent a man in a smock-frock is when he is cracking a

joke and showing a row of sound teeth, that cottage matrons are usually buxom, and

village children necessarily rosy and merry, are prejudices diffi cult to dislodge from

the artistic mind, which looks for its subjects into literature instead of life.^1

George Eliot’s words in an 1856 essay on W. H. Riehl’s Natural History of Ger-
man Life provide an indicative starting point for this collection, encapsulating
many of the myths and stereotypes that have typically dominated cultural ideas
of rurality. Art and literature, Eliot argued, had long depicted a vision of rural
life as a world of idyllic ploughmen, buxom maidens and rosy-faced children – a
vision, she contended, that was far from the ‘truth of rustic life’: ‘no one who is
well acquainted with the English peasantry can pronounce them merry’.^2 Eliot
called for a representation that would be attentive to ‘the perennial joys and
struggles, the toil, the tragedy, and the humour in the life of our more heavily-
laden fellow-men’ and that captured the distinct and unique characteristics of
diff erent rural environs – ‘its dialect, its phraseolog y, its proverbs, and its songs,
which belong alike to the entire body of the people’.^3
In the essays throughout this collection we encounter writers, Eliot among
them, whose works seek to redress many of these concerns, expanding the por-
trayal of rurality away from the myth of a rural idyll to instead show a more
diverse and complex picture of rural Britain in the nineteenth and early twenti-
eth century. Eliot’s words are indicative in revealing not only the intentions but
also some of the challenges and pitfalls of rural representation: as her comments
on ‘rustic peasants’ suggest, classed perspectives and politics play an important
role in shaping depictions of rurality. Th e mention of the jolly ploughman and
buxom maiden are indicative of the perseverance of traditional gender struc-